Friday, November 27, 2015

We had a great Thanksgiving dinner this year. My wife Shannon cooked the turkey upside-down so that the breast meat would stay moist. She also served all of the traditional side dishes such as stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls, and sparkling cider. At my request, we also had miniature pecan tarts because I recently became curious about butter tarts after hearing them referenced in the song "Steal My Sunshine" by Len.

It was the largest turkey we ever had so there was a lot left over for the next day. As is our family tradition, Shannon served us "turkey pancakes" for breakfast this morning. To make turkey pancakes, she cuts leftover turkey into bite-sized bits and mixes it with the leftover stuffing. Raw eggs are then added to hold the mix together when patted into a pancake shape. After pan-frying, the "pancakes" are served with leftover cranberry sauce and gravy. It is one of my favorites.

Today was also Family Day, a holiday which is celebrated by eating dinner with your children. We have been having supper together as a family almost every night for over half a year now and it seems to be working out. Sometimes it is the only opportunity that I have all day to communicate with a busy teenager.

In addition to Family Day, another holiday that I have added to my list of Optihumanist Holidays is Luxhom. Like Vitaspes, the word Luxhom is a word that I made up by joining two Latin words. Lux means light in Latin and is also the English word for the name of the metric unit for illuminance. Hom is short for hominis which means human.
In the same way that Christmas stands for "Christ mass", I was looking for a two-syllable variation on the name for the new holiday HumanLight.

Starting last year, however, we started celebrating HumanLight on December 25th which coincides with Christmas and the ancient Roman holiday Dies Natalis Solis Invictus, the birthday of the Unconquered Sun. Shannon did not like that our holiday was winding down while others were still ramping up so we pushed our celebration back a couple of days.

So what now is Luxhom? Luxhom is a holiday like HumanLight except that it is celebrated on December 25th.